Authors: Thomas E. Sniegoski
The Fallen 3
THE
FALLEN
3
A
LSO BY
T
HOMAS
E. S
NIEGOSKI
THE FALLEN 1
THE FALLEN
AND
LEVIATHAN
THE FALLEN 2
AERIE
AND
RECKONING
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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www.SimonandSchuster.com
First Simon Pulse paperback edition September 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Thomas E. Sniegoski
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Designed by Mike Rosamilia
The text of this book was set in Adobe Garamond.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sniegoski, Tom.
End of days / Thomas E. Sniegoski.
p. cm. — (The fallen ; 3)
Summary: Half angel and half human, Aaron commands the Fallen in their quest to protect humanity, drawing confidence from the girl he loves as he struggles to make peace with his legacy as Lucifer’s son.
ISBN 978-1-4424-2349-7 (pbk)
[1. Angels—Fiction. 2. Good and evil—Fiction. 3. Love—Fiction.
4. Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S68033En 2011
[Fic]—dc23
2011016979
ISBN 978-1-4424-2350-3 (eBook)
For John and Chandra Febonio—Congratulations. September 10, 2011
Thanks to my wife, LeeAnne, for without her love and hard work, this book would never have been completed. And thanks to Kirby for reminding me that it has been a very long time since there’s been a puppy in this house.
Thanks are also due to Christopher Golden, Annette Pollert, Liesa Abrams, James Mignogna, Dave Kraus, Mom and Dad Sniegoski, Mom and Dad Fogg, Pete Donaldson, Pam Daley, Timothy Cole, and the Evolution Revolution down at Cole’s Comics in Lynn.
And a very extra-special set of thanks to Erek Vaehne and Bella Pilyavskaya for helping me get this one just right.
PROLOGUE
S
IX
M
ONTHS
A
GO
L
eonard Michaels had secretly hoped it would never come to this.
He stood, perfectly still, in the kitchen of the Florida house where he had lived for the last twenty or so years. Though his kind did not sleep, per se, he had been roused from a meditative state by the most disturbing of sensations.
His leader was dead.
Verchiel was no more.
He understood what this meant. After all this waiting, it was time for him to act.
Opening the refrigerator, Leonard removed a pitcher of water and poured himself a glass. His hand trembled as he brought the drink to his desert-dry mouth, and gulped the contents down.
Verchiel’s death forced him to remember what he truly
was, what he hadn’t been for so very, very long. It had been so easy to lose himself in the masquerade of pretending to be what he wasn’t.
Pretending to be human.
He wasn’t really Leonard Michaels, retired housepainter, but something far more wondrous … far more dangerous.
He was Geburah, an angel of the heavenly host Powers, and Verchiel had been their master and commander. It was he who defined their purpose upon the earth. As angels of the Powers, they had one simple objective: keep the world of man clean of evil. If it would offend He who was the Creator of all—the Lord God Almighty—then they were to destroy it.
And the Powers performed this chore with the utmost efficiency, until an evil threatened not only earth but the Shining City of Heaven itself.
He poured himself another glass of water, recalling the monstrous threat.
Nephilim
.
The evil had been spawned by those who had fallen during the Great War between the armies of Lucifer Morning-star and the legions of Heaven. Those who had fled the Great War escaped to the world of man, and had mingled with the females of the species, creating children—
monsters
—the likes of which the Almighty could never have possibly loved.
Nephilim
.
They grew to be Verchiel’s obsession, and thusly the Powers’.
The Nephilim were a terrible plague upon the world, but the Powers met the challenge with venomous fervor, and the half-breed monsters were hunted down and exterminated one by one.
But their numbers were many.
The recollection of their screams and cries for mercy echoed through Geburah’s thoughts. He recalled the savagery of the Powers’ acts in the name of Heaven. There had been no other way. Their purpose had been to cleanse the world of evil, and the Nephilim had been the foulest of them all.
“Leonard?” asked a woman’s voice from the darkness.
For a moment Geburah had forgotten his humanity.
His wife stood in the doorway.
“Are you all right?” the old woman asked him, her eyes squinting in the harsh kitchen light.
“I’m fine,” he said, lying to the woman who had been his companion for a very long time.
He wasn’t all right.… Nothing would be right again.
Now that Verchiel was dead.
“Bad dreams?” his wife asked, coming to put her arms around him. Before the death of his leader, he would have met this sign of affection with great warmth, reveling in the love it exhibited, but now …
“Yes, Lillian,” he said with little emotion, placing his empty glass on the granite countertop. “Bad dreams.” He kissed her lightly, sending her back to bed and telling her he would join her soon.
That, too, was a lie. For with Verchiel gone, it was time for his mission to begin.
The Nephilim were a cunning foe, some able to survive the Powers’ attempts at extermination. There had even been rumors of an angelic prophecy that a Nephilim had been chosen by the Creator Himself as some sort of savior to bring forgiveness to those that had fallen during the war with the Morningstar, and allow them to return to Heaven.
The idea was blasphemous to them—some sort of Nephilim trick—and it made the Powers hate the accursed half-breeds all the more.
Verchiel had known that his, and his followers’, most holy mission would be fraught with peril and the potential for defeat, and he could not bear the thought of failure. If he and his Powers were to somehow meet with death, their purpose thwarted, there would be another way to achieve victory.
Geburah was a part of that alternative plan, along with five others who’d been carefully selected by Verchiel himself.
That meeting came flooding back to him, what he and the others had agreed upon if Verchiel and the remaining Powers were to meet their end.
And it filled him with fear.
Geburah considered running, going into his room, pulling his wife from their bed, and disappearing into the night, hiding from what he was to do now that Verchiel had failed.
But the thought was fleeting, dissipating like smoke in the wind as he whipped his head around, realizing that he was no longer alone in the kitchen.
The tall figure stood by the door, having silently come in from the night outside. It took him a moment, but Geburah recognized him as one of his own.
The angel had come for him.
“Hello, Suria,” Geburah greeted him. “Can I get you anything … a drink of water perhaps?”
Suria stared at him strangely, with a slight tilt of his head.
“I require nothing,” the angel said flatly.
Geburah nodded, turning his gaze toward the hallway, imagining his wife asleep in their bedroom upstairs.
He wanted so much to be back there, to feel her warmth as he held her in his arms,
to feel her humanity
.
“Verchiel is dead,” Suria stated.
Geburah looked away from the kitchen entrance, the pull of the bedroom already beginning to fade as the mask that he wore started to slip as duty called.